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Monday, May 25, 2009

Teachers with disabilities

The Onion nails it:

"Rather than punishing our teachers or kicking them out, we give them a gold star every time they do something right," Zicree continued. "If they write the correct answer to a math problem on the board, they get a gold star. If they volunteer to read aloud during English class, they get a gold star. You'd be amazed what a little positive reinforcement can do. Some of our teachers† have even stopped drinking in their cars during lunch."

8 comments:

"For teaching-disabled and at-risk educators, just coming to school every day is a challenge," said Dr. Robert Hughes, a behavioral psychologist and lead author of the study. "Even simple tasks, like remaining alert and engaged during lessons, can be a struggle. Unfortunately, unless we take immediate action, these under-performers will only continue to fall further behind."

"Our teachers are in trouble," Hughes continued. "Some can't even teach at a basic sixth-grade level."

Alessi studied kids who'd been referred to the school psychologist for failures to learn or to behave & found that in all cases the cause of the school failure was found to lie in the child, not the school.

That's a bad result for those children but when you think about the larger effects of such absolutism you realize it's bad for everyone, including the kids who weren't referred.

Unfortunately, at the moment I've forgotten the specific example I had in mind....

A high school English teacher, with a whole wall of awards and workshop certificates, was very much into dream interpretation. She told her Honors class one day that she had dreamed of being chased by chestnuts. The next morning, she entered the room to find a handful of chestnuts on her desk; she ran from the room, screaming, and was not seen again that day. She not only was more than slightly unstable, she was either unable or uninterested in teaching either literature or writing; her class learned nothing. The administrators loved her, though. Sadly, this is truth, not parody.